Here in the winery, the hurly burly of Vintage 2009 is fading into the distance. We’ve packed up the vintage gear & sent the vintage casuals packing, making it pretty quiet around here.  Even though the Vintage casuals are only here for a short time, they always immerse themselves in the Torbreck Culture (lots of good wine and good food along with hard work of course) and become part of the family.  It’s a great way to meet people from all over the world who share our passion for wine.
 
For 2009, we had 5 casuals from the USA, 2 from France, 2 from Italy and one Brazilian.  Each year after vintage, most of the casuals do a road trip.  This year a rabble consisting of 2 Frenchies, 2 Italians & a Yank made their way along the Great Ocean Road in a Kombi Van – the photo says it all.  But you know the rules - ‘what goes on in the Kombi, stays in the Kombi’. Click here to view

There’s still always plenty to do after vintage is over so we keep pretty busy in the winery, BUT we do it at a more relaxing pace compared with the craziness we’re used to during vintage.  Now the winery crew is all male (sorry Emma, but the lab doesn’t count*) and believe it or not, we can do 2 things at once!  We have been:

1.    Racking the 09 wines off malo, sulphuring them up and putting them back to sleep in barrel
2.    Putting blends together for upcoming bottlings

Both these jobs are quite an exercise.  We have some 200 odd individual parcels of fruit from the 09 vintage.  Each individual parcel of wine is kept separate throughout the fermentation and maturation process.  So that’s 200 odd different malo rackings to be done.  We’re about half way there at the moment.  And the blending? We taste through each individual barrel of each individual parcel of wine to ensure each barrel meets the profile and standard that we require for a particular wine.  We’ve recently tasted all the contenders for some of the 2007 wines including The Factor, The Steading, Les Amis and The Pict.  At Torbreck, we get amazing parcels of fruit from amazing vineyards and you’ve tried the wines and seen the results.  So imagine our big purple grins as we taste through these barrels of wine.  It’s quite a job, but its the best job in the world!

Cheers – Russell (aka Burnsy) Burns – Assistant Winemaker

*I’ll be in big trouble for that!

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